STACY ALAIMO

Displacing Darwin and Descartes

The Bodily Transgressions of Fielding Burke, Octavia Butler, and Linda Hogan 1
I. Fielding Burke and the Flight from the Body
A disturbing scene in Fielding Burke's Call Home the Heart (1932) raises potent questions about how environmental feminism can negotiate the racially inflected ideologies of nature and the body. Because the discursive links between "nature," the "body," and racist hierarchies have, historically, been so firmly forged, it is crucial not only to understand how these discourses have functioned but also to determine the possibilities for transforming this volatile space. Burke's novel demonstrates how two predominant ideologies of nature, the social Darwinist and the romantic, employ a racially marked body to bolster white supremacy. Her novel exemplifies the discursive territory that Octavia Butler and Linda Hogan disrupt through their bodily transgressions. While Burke narrates a tale of white flight from the debased "natural" body, Butler and Hogan occupy corporeality in order to recreate it as a space of liminality and resistance. Burke's Call Home the Heart, a socialist-feminist novel, tells the struggles of Ishma, a young woman who leaves her husband and her home in the mountains because she " 'couldn't go on living like an old cow. Fodder in winter and grass in summer and a calf every year'" (393). Significantly she flees from the "animality" of her existence, especially the endless reproduction, and ends up fighting for

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miners during the Gastonia strikes in North Carolina. Fortunately, a communist doctor and comrade gives Ishma the information she needs to control her own reproduction. Yet, ideologically, it is not until the strangely pivotal and disturbing scene with Gaffie Wells that Ishma gains freedom from her own body. After having courageously saved Gaffie's husband from lynching by a Ku Klux Klan group, Ishma ungraciously receives her outpouring of gratitude: Game Wells was very fat and very black. Her lips were heavy, and her teeth so large that one needed the sure avouch of eyes to believe in them. It was impossible to associate her with woe, though tears were racing down her cheeks. As her fat body moved she shook off an odor that an unwashed collie would have disowned. "Bressed angel, bressed angel ob de Lawd," she kept repeating, and with a great sweep enveloped Ishma, her fat arms encircling the white neck, her thick lips mumbling at the quivering white throat. "We'll all be in heaben togeddah! Sistah! sistah! Yo' sho' got Jedus in you!" The fleshy embrace, the murky little room, the smoking ashes, the warm stench, the too eager faces shining greasily at the top of big, black bodies, filled Ishma with uncontrollable revulsion. She thought of a high, clean rock on Cloudy Knob, half covered with sweet moss and red-tipped galax. She shut her eyes and saw a cardinal flying over the snow. (383) Ishma recoils from Gaffie Wells, who becomes in her eyes a horrific, racist signifier of the body. Gaffie's earthly, massive, black flesh threateningly encircles the white "angel's" fragile neck. Ishma escapes the claustrophobic entrapment of the flesh by imagining a "high, clean rock" and an ethereal cardinal soaring over (white) snow. Ishma's white, romanticized view of an aesthetic, spiritual, liberating nature thus displaces the "low" aspects of the natural, the inescapable corporeality of human beings, onto the "lower" race.2 This scene demonstrates how even though "the body" has been persistently coded as female in Western culture, white women have fled from corporeal connections with a debased nature by displacing that nature onto the bodies of African Americans and others. While illustrating the interlocking ideologies of race and gender, this scene also manifests the counterposed ideologies of a "romantic" versus a social Darwinist nature that have persisted in the United

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States. Social Darwinismas a popularized ideology, not as a strictly scientific theoryplaces humans, like other life forms, in a struggle for the survival of the "fittest," which serves to justify capitalism by naturalizing it. Indeed, the "survival of the fittest" metaphor naturalizes racist inequities by categorizing types of bodies. Once race is accepted as a natural classification, social Darwinism can employ racial hierarchies to mitigate anxieties about human corporeality anxieties fostered by the theory of evolution. Darwin toppled "man" from his Adamic role as master of the animals by stressing the striking similarities and the kinship between humans and other primates. Perhaps the perceived indignity of having fallen to the level of other life forms motivated some middle- to upper-class white Americans to insist upon a hierarchical chain of being in which Native Americans and African Americans occupy the lowest rung. In order to ease their anxieties about being related to a nature they assumed they had risen above, whites interposed the "lower races" to serve as a border zone between WASPs and a debased nature. Social Darwinism, then, takes the Cartesian hierarchy between mind and body and stretches it into a racist and anthropocentric scale, in part by imagining that evolution is teleological. Romantic conceptions of nature,3 on the other hand, invoke nature as a disembodied space, a place in which the individual can mentally or spiritually find respite, a place to feel that "unity with nature." If social Darwinism negotiates humans' troublesome corporeality by placing human bodies on a hierarchical scale in which some bodies are closer to "nature" than others, the romantic view of nature flees the corporeal realm altogether by seeking a mental or spiritual communion with nature. Yet the very perfection of this unity with nature denies nature its own specificity. In the romantic view, nature serves as a mirror for the subject, the subject who reduces "all others to the economy of the Same" (Irigaray, 74). Or, as Chaia Heller explains, our "idea of nature has become the small, blue pool into which Narcissus gazed, enamored of his own reflection" (231). In the scene above, for example, Ishma fantasizes about a cardinal flying against snow that serves to mirror (and produce) her own "clean" whiteness. Moreover, such romantic musings usually emanate from a disembodied Cartesian subject, who is, by definition, radically severed from all that is "natural." The pivotal scene in Call Home the Heart illustrates how the dual images of nature, the idealized and the debased, work as two sides

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of the same system, a system that maps a Cartesian dichotomy onto nature: the idealized version of nature is associated with the human mind or spirit, while the debased version of nature is associated with the human body. It is curious and ironic that the Cartesian dichotomy would be replicated on nature, since the Cartesian mind, as Val Plumwood explains, defines itself against nature: Descartes enforces a strict and total division not only between mental and bodily activity, but between mind and nature and between human and animal. As mind becomes pure thought pure res cogitans or thinking substance, mental, incorporeal, without location, bodilessbody as its dualised other becomes pure matter, pure res extensa, materiality as lack. (115) Replicating and mapping these dichotomies onto nature creates the dual face of nature as ethereal or abject, which allows those who have defined nature as something apart from themselves to imaginatively create another nature to which they have privileged access. During the back-to-nature movements in the early twentieth century, for example, many middle- to upper-class white males in the United States, such as the conservationist William T. Hornaday, in
Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation, reiterated

that the wilderness properly belonged to white men, even as they depicted blacks, Italians, and other "lower races" as savages that are closer to nature. Thus, historically, nature has been mapped by mind/body dichotomies that are coded by gender and race, associating women and people of color with abject bodily resources. Negotiating such an ideologically mined terrain is extremely difficult, especially when the idealized version of nature seems to be complicitous in maintaining its mirror image. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, perhaps leaping into an ethereal realm as Ishma does can only be accomplished by propelling "nature" onto the bodies of others. Indeed, as Elizabeth Grosz explains, in dichotomous thinking the "subordinated term is merely the negation or denial, the absence or privation of the primary term, its fall from grace; the primary term defines itself by expelling its other and in this process establishes its own boundaries and borders to create an identity for itself" (3). Taking disembodied, romantic flight strengthens the dichotomies between the corporeal and the ethereal, the body and the mind, nature and culture.

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Occupying the space of the abject body, however, offers the potential for disrupting this constellation of ideologies. Precisely because the body has been so intimately associated with racially, sexually, and environmentally destructive ideologies of nature, it offers a potent site for contestation and transformation. In Volatile Bodies, Grosz argues that reconceptions of the body can be used to disrupt our most enduring binary oppositions. Instead of participating ini.e., adhering to one side or the other ofa binary pair, these pairs can be more readily problematized by regarding the body as the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of binary pairs. The body is neitherwhile also being boththe private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social. . . . This indeterminable position enables it to be used as a particularly powerful strategic term to upset the frameworks by which these binary pairs are considered. (23-24) Linda Hogan and Octavia Butler evoke the body precisely in this way: they rewrite the body as a liminal, indeterminable space that disrupts the opposition between nature and culture, object and subject. At the same time, they invoke bodily connections to nature in which neither term is debased. Although stressing the connections between the body and nature could reinforce the same system of oppositions that are coded by gender and race, Hogan and Butler rewrite the body in ways that disrupt historically ingrained patterns. They invoke the body, not as a mute, passive, abject space that signifies the debased or inferior part of our natures, but as a place of liminality, connection, and knowledge. By rewriting the body they also displace social Darwinist vertical hierarchies with horizontal relationships. The verticality of the racially coded Cartesian split shown in Call Home the Heart is toppled, and a variety of horizontal parallels, transformations, and intersections take its place: Hogan charts the parallel and intersecting paths of humans, mountain lions, and whales, while Butler transforms her female protagonist into dolphin and leopard. Instead of peering down at other creatures, they look across, from within, and, also important, away from. By inhabiting corporeality and emphasizing embodied perspectives, Butler and Hogan e-race the social Darwinist hierarchy of life forms and the Cartesian split between mind and body.

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II. Bodily (In)Vestments versus Bodily Knowledges in Octavia Butler's Wild Seed
Ego is an identification with the mind. When ego develops, the head takes over and exerts tyrannical control over the rest of the body.... But thought is as much a product of the eye, the finger, or the foot as it is of the brain. (Trinh, 39) Octavia Butler's Wild Seed dramatizes a battle between two modes of knowing and being: the tyrannical force of an egotistical, disembodied mind and the transformative powers of an utterly embodied woman. Doro, an immortal creature whose vocation is to breed human beings for extraordinary physical or mental strengths, keeps his people like slaves; he owns them, he controls their reproduction, and he even consumes some of them. In a later book of the same series, Mind of My Mind, Doro confesses to one of "his" people that he began breeding humans because people with a "certain mental sensibility" simply tasted the best (90). "Wild seed" is Doro's name for the people he collects for their genetic potential, people who are "too valuable to be casually killed" (13). Doro represents a slavemaster ideology that treats humans as seeds to be sown and harvested, as farm animals to be used and bred by their owners. Although Doro breeds people of all races, his practices suggest the treatment of African slaves in the United States and the racist and capitalist ideologies that naturalized the institution of slavery. "Wild seed" encapsulates the capitalist response to nature that slave owners extended onto African bodies: wild seed, like other "natural resources," supposedly has no value until the entrepreneur discovers it, appropriates it, and transforms it into something "valuable." Representing a horrific Cartesian subjectivity, Doro must kill in order to obtain new bodies; he needs a fresh supply of bodies to "wear" until they are worn out. Radically severed from his own corporeality, he exists as amalgam of mind and will that prospers by subjugating other human bodies. Doro would agree with his fellow breeder John Hammond, the "creator" of the dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park, who contends, "Creation is an act of sheer will." Although Doro often mates with women himself, using his body-ofthe-week to impregnate them, it is his will that drives his plan to create a master race. As the metaphor "wild seed" suggests, he treats humans the way humans have treated nature, as a space evacuated

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of mind. "Cartesian thought declares nonhuman nature terra nullius, uninhabited by mind, totally available for annexation, a sphere easily molded to the ends of a reason conceived as without limits" (Plumwood, 192). Doro extends the Cartesian territory of terra nullius into human bodies, bodies that he can colonize, breed, and control with his disembodied mind. For Doro, both a Cartesian and a capitalist, bodies are nothing but vestments and investments. Butler counterposes Anyanwu to Doro: she is the only one sufficiently strong and immortal to be a match for him. Unlike Doro, she does not require a perpetually new wardrobe of bodies for her journey through millennia. Anyanwu's own body is no mere vestmentit is her greatest strength. When first threatened by Doro's power she realizes that neither God nor prayer would save her: "she had only herself and the magic she could perform with her own body" (36). That magic includes healing herself, healing others, manufacturing medicines within her own body, and transforming herself into many different bodies, old and young, male and female, black and white, human and animal. As in her Xenogenesis Trilogy, Butler radically challenges the oppositions between body and mind, nature and culture by creating bodies that know. Anyanwu's body "reads" the information embodied in other creatures (80), suggesting that corporeality, like culture, is coded and that bodies, not just minds, have the power to interpret these codes. Perhaps the genre of science fiction allows Octavia Butler to surpass Judith Butler's recreation of the body: here the body is not only a site of inscription but also an interpreter of codes. By describing the body as a place that is not only written upon but an entity that also reads, Butler stresses the body's agency and "mind," which radically challenges Cartesian dualisms and nature/culture dichotomies. For example, by eating dolphin flesh for the first time, Anyanwu's body learns dolphin-ness: For her, the flesh of the fish told her all she needed to know about the creature's physical structureall she needed to know to take its shape and live as it did. Just a small amount of raw flesh told her more than she had words to say. Within each bite, the creature told her its story clearly thousands of times. (79) Although rather gruesome from a vegetarian perspective,4 this scene collapses the dichotomies between nature and culture, body

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and mind, subject and object, as each bite gives an enlightening gustatory-narrative puissance. Carol J. Adams has argued that the "traffic in animals" functions, in part, by ontologizing animals into "meat" as a "mass term" that naturalizes the eating of animals by denying them their uniqueness and individuality (201-2). While Anyanwu does consume the dolphin, the passage as a whole works against the ontology of animals as a mass term because the dolphin is hardly a piece of mute flesh significantly, it has its own story to tell. This story is told in a mode of signification that not only transgresses the nature-culture divide but surpasses the usual forms of communication: Anyanwu "thought her flesh-messages even more specific than ... books" (80). She ingests so much information that her body is able to transform itself into a dolphin and experience a different way of seeing, breathing, and enjoying the "tricks" that her dolphin body "knew" (82). She realizes that dolphins have a complex system of communication, do not enslave their own people as humans do, and enjoy rather seductive mating rituals, as she is swept into a mating dance with a charming male dolphin. Unfortunately, a human male takes her back to the ship before she can consummate this relationship. When Isaac, the man Anyanwu will later marry, jumps into the water to bring her back, Anyanwu (as a dolphin) finds him a "clumsy thing, stiff and strangehardly as tempting as the male dolphin she was just courting" (85). Rather than extolling bestiality, this scene demonstrates to what extent embodied perspectives shape our desires and judgments, as does a later scene in which a now-white Anyanwu is horrified to realize that she walked by a slave market without noticing the slaves (211). Embodied knowledges affect ethical commitments as well as blind spots; Anyanwu's experience as a dolphin compels her to vow never to eat dolphin again. By emphasizing to what extent bodily perspectives shape our perceptions, Anyanwu's experiences critique the epistemological ideal of objectivity, which claims to be perspectiveless. Similarly, Donna Haraway condemns the ideals of objectivity, which relativism and totalization promote, as irresponsible "god-tricks" that promise "vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully" (191). She argues that "only partial perspective promises objective vision": "Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. In this way we might become answerable for what we leam how to see" (190).

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Anyanwu's transformations collapse the subject/object dichotomy central to scientific models of objectivity and to the Cartesian subjectivity that gave rise to these models. Anyanwu only knows the "object" of her knowledge, the dolphin, after she (the subject) has transformed herself into it; the divisions between subject and object collapse as one transforms into the other.5 Anyanwu's ontological transformations dramatize an embodied epistemology that acts as an antidote to willful separations and masterful machinations. Wild Seed paints a monstrous portrait of Cartesian subjectivity while creating an alternative in Anyanwu, whose name invitingly sounds like "anyone-you." By shape-shifting into eagle, dolphin, and leopard, Anyanwu transgresses the human-animal divide, traveling horizontally into different, but not inferior, forms that offer alternative ways of seeing the world. Anyanwu enacts Maria Lugones's argument for "traveling to someone's 'world'" as a way to understand "what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes." She contends that only "when we have traveled to each other's 'worlds' are we fully subjects to each other" (401). In Butler's work, animals are not objects for appropriation but subjects living in "worlds" of their own. Furthermore, Anyanwu, like several feminist epistemologists, dramatizes the extent to which knowledges are embodied and suggests a model of knowing that sees animal and human bodies as active, signifying forces, not abject, mute, passive resources. Butler casts off the body as a mere vestment or investment and transforms it into a liminal space that blurs the divisions between humans and animals, subjects and objects, nature and culture.

III. Linda Hogan's "Terrain of Crossed Beginnings"

Linda Hogan, in an interview with Patricia Clark Smith, stated that after participating in a research project on wolves in northern Minnesota she realized that "wolves really are the projection of people's inner fears or desires." She also discovered how "difficult it is for people to see differencebetween one human being and another, between species. What people look for is similaritiesor shadow the shadow-self, as Jung says, so you can look for evil on the outside and not have to acknowledge your inner evil" (151). These projections, of course, are no mere psychological matterthey have contributed to the extermination of many thousands of wolves in the

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United States alone. It is therefore important for environmental philosophy to create conceptions of nature that neither radically sever it from humanity nor pose it as a tabula rasa for human inscriptions.6 While Hogan's poetry evokes profound connections with nature, it strives to affirm nature's differences, in part by refusing to engulf it within human projections. As it represents human-nature relations with a difference, Hogan's poetry rejects both the romantic and the debased versions of nature, which are both projections of a Cartesian self. Here I will limit my discussion to her latest collection of
poems, The Book of Medicines.

"Mountain Lion," for example, eschews any simple bond or mystified moment of unity as it describes the speaker's fearful encounter with the mountain lion. Hogan grants the mountain lion her own perspective that reverses the usual categories of the civilized and the wild, a perspective in which the human "was the wild thing / she had learned to fear." She also acknowledges that the mountain lion does not desire her presence; in fact, "Her power lived / in a dream of my leaving." Knowing that the lion would prefer her absence complicates whether the speaker can look at her. The look serves as a metonym for their vexed relation. It was the same way I have looked so many times at others in clear light before lowering my eyes and turning away from what lives inside those who have found two worlds cannot live inside a single vision. (27) By turning away and lowering her eyes, the "I" of the poem acknowledges the mountain lion's integrity and difference. By looking away, she does not entrap the lion within the parameters of her gaze. As John Berger explains, the human gaze has objectified animals: "animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are" (16). Paradoxically, by diverting

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her gaze and choosing to know less, not more, about the mountain lion, she does not push the lion farther away by making her into an object of knowledge within the poet's gaze but instead acknowledges that they exist in separate, but parallel, worlds. She deflects the romantic desire to feel a sense of unity with the lion or to use the lion as a mirror to reflect her own consciousness. She also refuses to colonize the lion's territory or self by subsuming it into her own view. The colonizing response to nature operates, in part, through "denying and canceling [nature's] independence of self" (Plumwood, 191). These responses to the lion would destroy her: "two worlds cannot live / inside a single vision." In "Naming the Animals" (40-41), language, not vision, entraps the animals. Leaving Eve out, Hogan rewrites the story of Adam naming the animals by suggesting that naming is a proprietary act. After he named "legs, hands, / the body / of man" these he named; wolf, bear, other as if they had not been there before his words, had not had other tongues and powers or sung themselves into life before him. These he sent crawling into wilderness he could not enter (40) Naming captures the animals in language, seemingly to fence them within the sphere of human territory; yet, the final act sends them "crawling into wilderness / he could not enter." Whereas acknowledging the integrity of the mountain lion's vision allows the poet and the lion to retain a parallel relationship, naming the animals within human language paradoxically inscribes them as the nothuman. Moreover, although the animals had "been there / before his words," the act of naming constitutes an ersatz "creation" that negates the animals by conjuring them into language only to expel them. Descartes appears to incite this process, since naming the animals follows naming "the body / of man." After severing mind from body, man divorces himself from animals and constructs a wilderness to contain the exiled. The animals' abject status would then be transferred to certain groups of humans: the children of Adam "would call us pigs."

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Rather than denying the racist appellation of "pig," the speaker of the poem abruptly affirms the misnomer: I am a pig, the child of pigs, wild in this land of their leavings, drinking from water that burns at the edge of a savage country of law and order. (40) By affirming a connection to one of the most abject animals, Hogan underscores a historical truth, that Christians treated Indians with disdain and brutality, as "pigs"; but she also takes refuge in a space that is not the territory of a "savage country / of law and order." In her interview with Smith, Hogan discusses how "women and Indians are often equated with animals, in ways that have negative connotations for all three." When Smith suggests this underlines "the horror people have of the physical," Hogan responds, "And of the body, of all matter. Matter is not our primary concern in this country, or in Western thinking" (148-49). Instead of distancing herself from the abject, Hogan animates matter itself. Like the animals "at the fierce edge of forest" who "know the names for themselves," the speaker, at the end of the poem, finds her power through physicality: From somewhere I can't speak or tell, my stolen powers hold out their hands and sing me through. (41) As the animals had already "sung themselves into life" before their naming by man, the speaker is recreated. Although she cannot articulate where the source of her powers lie, perhaps because (the English) language itself enforces the mind /matter split, the metaphor of her powers holding "out their hands" suggests an embodied passage "through," to a time "before" Cartesian, Adamic separations, to a time when "there [were] no edges to the names" (40). Living in an age when matter doesn't matter, it seems crucial for Hogan to accentuate human embodiment. In an interview with

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Joseph Bruchac, Hogan explained the fundamental importance of physicality: "We're here on earth with our bodies. We're not meant for outer space physically or spiritually. People who go into the mental can go off too far into the mental. I don't know many people who can go off too far into the physical (I don't mean athletically or sexually, I mean awareness of the body)" (130). Awareness of the body not only offers a sense of grounding for humans, it also holds out the possibility for connections with nature that neither obliterate its differences nor reinforce hierarchies of beings. Along with "Naming the Animals," several other poems in The Book of Medicines capture a yearning to experience bodily ties with nature and to cross over to a time when those corporeal connections were most evident. "Crossings" reverses the teleological and anthropocentric misconception that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," which is usually portrayed as the (human) fetus replaying the entire evolutionary procession by developing from fish to human. Instead of speaking of a human fetus with fishlike characteristics, Hogan describes a fetal whale with human features: Not yet whale, it still wore the shadow of a human face, and fingers that had grown before the taking back and turning into fin. (28) Wearing a "shadow of / a human face," the fetal whale is hauntingly humanlike; caught in a frozen, illuminating moment on a "block of shining ice," the creature embodies a corporeal "crossing" between whale and human. Significantly, the human form is not the ultimate destination: the fingers are taken back and transformed into fin, a more fitting form for whale life. Seeing the fetal whale evokes a longing for the "terrain of crossed beginnings": Sometimes the longing in me comes from when I remember the terrain of crossed beginnings when whales lived on land and we stepped out of water to enter our lives in air. (28)

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The corporeal crossings embodied by the human features of the fetal whale parallel the geographic, evolutionary paths of humans and whales that crossed in the past. Although the poet longs for the time when the paths crossed and humans and whales met at the intersection, the narrator does not envelop the whale in her longing, but instead charts the separate, but intersecting, paths that the two species have taken. Hogan displaces a ladder of beings with a horizontal, nonhierarchical model of difference. "Skin Dreaming" and "Great Measures" also evoke a mythical past of corporeal crossings. In "Skin Dreaming," skin, which is "the oldest thing," is also the closest thing to God touching oil, clay, intimate with the foreign land of air and other bodies. (70) Skin is "godly," not because it is transcendent or ethereal, but because of its liminality, its intimacy with the "outside" world of oil, clay, "other bodies," and the "foreign land of air." The juxtaposition of intimacy with the "foreignness" of something as common as air depicts the skin as a sort of a brave corporeal ambassador, crossing borders. Skin, somehow, has a memory: "It remembers when it was the cold / builder of fire" (70). The skin blends into the cold air that chills it. As a liminal zone, the skin both "was the cold" itself and was also the "cold / builder of fire," as the line break suggests. Since fire is a common icon for human achievement, these lines make skin a corporeal agent of culture. No gift from the gods on high, fire is created by the skin that it will warm. Skin is not only spatially liminal but temporally liminal; it comes from the past, from ancestors and forests. It has fallen through ancestral hands. It is the bearer of vanished forest fallen through teeth and jaws of earth where we were once other visions and creations. (70)

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Skin falls from the "ancestral hands" as if it were an unplanned gift from the ancestors, a gift that has escaped the predatory "teeth and jaws of earth." As a liminal zone the skin is both part of the oil and clay it touches, yet it has escaped being absorbed back into the earth itself. Skin "bears" vanished forest in somehow bringing forth the forests of the past it has been intimate with, but it also must "bear" the fact that the forest has vanished. Born from its ancestors, skin brings forth both the presence and the absence of the forests "where we were once other / visions and creations." Similarly, in "The History of Red," another poem in the same collection, it is the "cave of skin / that remembers bisons" (11). The final lines of "Skin Dreaming" suggest that skin dreams recall a time and place where humans were not human; the skin as a liminal boundary dissolves, dissolving a distinctly human identity. Although it has genealogical "roots" in the past, Hogan's image of the skin is similar to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a rhizome, which "connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states" (21). The skin connects with oil, clay, air, cold, ancestors, and forestsboth signifying and nonsignifying states. More important, like the rhizome, it is "always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (25). By being precisely in the middle, skin disrupts the old dichotomies that sever nature from culture, subject from object, body from mind. Grosz explains that in Deleuze and Guattari's writing, "subject and object can no longer be seen in terms of rigid boundaries, clear demarcations; nor, on an opposite track, can they be seen as inherently united, singular or holistic" (167). In other words, their work "de-massifies the entities that binary thought counterposes against each other" (181). Similarly, Hogan transforms the skin from a boundary that contains the human form into a liminal zone that connects across and dissolves boundaries. "Great Measures" dissolves the boundaries of the human into corporeal connections with substances and elements of the earth. The voice of the poem describes the "first time a lover held me" as an elemental transformation into body and liquid. I was hand, body, liquid ruled by dark seas

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that swallow the edges of land and give them up to another place. I am still this measure of brine, ancient carbon, the pull of iron across linked and desperate distances, beginning and end together the way sunlight on skin is still connected to the fiery storms of its origins. (81) The "I" defines herself as a "measure" of the basic fluids and elements of life. The word measure suggests the materiality of the definition, since places, substances, and ingredients are measured; but it also suggests a section of music, a section made up of the same basic elements as the other measures and related to them through patterns of melody and harmony. Yet this is a profoundly antiromantic definition; the images of brine, carbon, and iron are not prettified, lofty, or ethereal: no rainbows or flowers here. Again the skin suggests to the poet the origins of life itself; the fiery storms recall cauldrons of lava deep in the earth. The connection is an embodied, sensual one: sunlight on skin does not look like fire, it feels like fire. But most significant, the "I" of the poem defines herself as "the pull of iron / across linked and desperate distances;" her body becomes not a self-enclosed place but a magnetic force that pulls together "desperate distances." "Desperate" suggests the strong desire for these severed distances to reconnect, yet the images of brine, carbon, and iron disrupt any lingering desire for a holistic unity that would contain and govern these dispersed elements. Like Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs" that is not a "fragmented, splintered body" but instead "nonstratified, unformed, intense matter" (164, 153), the body in "Great Measures" transgresses ordinary physical boundaries by becoming a multiplicity of nonstratified matter, the same elemental matter that exists across desperate distances. The body is a crucial site for contestation and transformation, precisely because ideologies of the body have been complicit in the degradation of people of color, women, and nature. Octavia Butler's Wild Seed and Linda Hogan's poetry in The Book of Medicines challenge the dominant dichotomies by envisioning bodily transgres-

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sions and corporeal crossings. They transform the body from a site of abjection into a means of connection. Instead of displacing corporeality onto the bodies of racially marked others as Ishma does in Call Home the Heart, they displace the Cartesian and social Darwinist ideologies, which cast the body as abject, by rewriting the body as place of power, knowledge, and liminality. Rosi Braidotti describes a "new form of corporeal materialism" in which "the body is seen as an interface, a threshold, a field of intersection of material and symbolic forces" (219). For this corporeal materialism to effectively challenge the system of dichotomies that sever nature from culture, it is important that the body be not only a place that has been inscribed by cultural forces, as Judith Butler describes it, but a threshold where nature and culture dissolve, a rhizomatic place that connects "desperate distances" through elemental relations to such things as brine, carbon, and the pull of iron. Not exactly abject and certainly not sublime, images of brine and carbon suggest another way of envisioning nature that neither engulfs it within a romantic vision nor severs it from humanity altogether. By refusing to divide nature from culture, body from mind, subject from object, Linda Hogan and Octavia Butler throw out the old maps and encourage us to find new ways of understanding the places we inhabit, the places we are.7

NOTES

1. My book-manuscript-in-progress, "Cartographies of Undomesticated Ground: Nature and Feminism in American Women's Fiction and Theory," which argues that "nature" has served as a crucial imaginative zone for the cultural work of feminism, contains a more extensive discussion of Call Home the Heart and analyses of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy, along with other texts. 2. I am using the term romantic in a rather broad sense to describe an idealized and elevated version of nature that exists outside the human self. For an interesting feminist critique of how nature has been portrayed within ideologies of romantic love, see Chaia Heller. 3. The editors pointed out that some readers may object to Butler's description of Anyanwu's eating of the dolphin and my discussion of it. As a vegetarian (for the last twenty years) and a scuba diver who wildly hopes to see a dolphin someday, I hardly intended to advocate eating dolphins (or any other animal). In Butler's novel, as I point out, Anyanwu vows never to

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eat dolphin again after experiencing the dolphin's world. Moreover, as the discussion in the text explores, this scene as a whole contests the ontology of animals as a "mass term" that underwrites the eating of animals (see Carol Adams). Greta Gaard insightfully critiques my discussion of Anyanwu's consumption of the dolphin by explaining that "the whole ecofeminism-deep ecology debate has addressed, among other things, the fact that ecofeminists critique deep ecologists for 'knowing' the Other in a way that subsumes the identity of the Other, in effect annihilating the Other. This happens when you eat someone; they are gone" (Personal correspondence). While I find this a persuasive argument in general, in this case I think that Anyanwu's eating of the dolphin has the opposite effect: difference is not subsumed but underscored through Anyanwu's transformative experience. 4. Greta Gaard, in "Ecofeminism and Native American Cultures: Pushing the Limits of Cultural Imperialism?" has argued that for white ecofeminists to import Native American texts to underwrite their theories is an unnecessary act of cultural imperialism that divorces the texts from their contexts. I agree that it is problematic for white writers to analyze works by people of color because of the risks of cultural appropriation and the severing of texts from their cultural contexts, as well as for other reasons too numerous to elaborate here. However, in an effort to avoid appropriation, critics can further marginalize certain works by assuming that their cultural context is "limited" to Native American culture. In Hogan's interviews, for example, she makes it clear that she is writing from a Native American perspective, but she is also critiquing Western, specifically contemporary U.S., culture (of which she is also, of course, a part). To avoid her incisive critiques and relegate her or other Native American writers to an "anthropological corner" would be to marginalize her work. While I believe that it is important to consider the cultural contexts of texts, especially Native American texts, I also think it is crucial, politically, to disrupt the firmly entrenched model of margin and center that replicates oppressive structures. Whyto take a different exampleshould something like "postmodernism" be defined in such a way as to make the works by Anglo males the central avante-garde texts, while works by women, people of color, and gays and lesbians are positioned on the borders? 5. See Patrick D. Murphy, "Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice," for an important model of "the other," which is based on "ecological processes of interanimation" rather than psychoanaltytic constructs. 6. Thanks to Rajani Sudan for helping me remember this phrase. 7. I would like to thank Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy for all of their constructive and thought-provoking comments.

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. Interview by Patricia Clark Smith. In This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, 141-55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Hornaday, William T. Our Vanishing Wildlife: Its Extermination and Preservation. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Lugones, Maria. "Playfullness, 'World'-Traveling, and Loving Perception."
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tives by Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldua, 390-402. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990. Murphy, Patrick D. "Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice." Hypatia 6, no. 1 (spring 1991): 146-61. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993. Trinh, Min-ha T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.